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Siemens is renaming its UK traffic business from this month, changing it from Traffic Solutions to Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS), which the company says better reflects its focus on intelligence within its traffic management activities, products and systems, and aligns the UK business with the company’s global operations.

Explaining the change, Siemens UK’s general manager, Tom MacMorran, said, “With the emergence of connected car and autonomous vehicle technologies, and a growing number of ITS research projects underway across the UK, it is an exciting time for ITS and road infrastructure providers, app developers, vehicle manufacturers and research institutions.

“From journey planning to better traffic flow, parking and enforcement, our intelligent traffic systems are at the heart of integrated mobility and connected infrastructure, providing ‘end-to-end’ journey efficiency. We believe system intelligence and data is fundamental to integrated transport, and see our updated name as more reflective of global industry developments and our overall position in the market.”

Earlier this year, Siemens started a connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) project, in a collaborative partnership to create one of the most advanced environments for CAV technologies in the UK. Together with nine other consortium members, the UK Connected Intelligent Transport Environment (UK CITE) project will see trials on UK roads as early as next year, following a successful application for funding from the government’s £100m (US$124m) Intelligent Mobility Fund.

Further demonstrating its commitment to innovation, Siemens is also involved as technical partner in an exciting new project in the UK to assess how connected vehicles interact on key corridors leading into Coventry’s city center from the national road network. Led by Coventry City Council, the Intelligent Variable Message Systems (iVMS) project will draw on cutting edge expertise from Coventry University’s Centre for Mobility and Transport, in collaboration with project partners Horiba Mira and Serious Games International, to develop a real-world Connected Car to Infrastructure demonstrator in the West Midlands. This project started in January 2016 and is planned to end in 2018.

Launched at the ITS European Congress in the summer, Siemens’s new Intelligent Parking System provides integration of traffic and parking solutions, adopting parking bay sensors to provide cities with a demand-responsive system. Data produced gives valuable statistics to help city planning, allowing strategies to be shaped in order to increase revenue, improve customer satisfaction, and achieve better compliance in an iterative and dynamic manner.